AI for American-produced cement and concrete

Only (April) fools would trust Facebook's technology with anything as safety critical as construction work.

Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.

There should be an app for this. But that's so last-decade.

[1] https://store.forneyonline.com/concrete-testing-equipment/fr...

Wrong day to release this. I had to read halfway through the release before realizing it’s legitimate.

Awesome. People take concrete for granted. Even at small scales (e.g. your patio) with formulas provided on the cement bag, concrete can go wrong (crazing, scaling, cracks). There's a lot of unappreciated craft in the work, not only in the composition and mixing, which is what this research seems dedicated to, but also in the placing, leveling, curing, finishing.

> As a result, producers need a way to rapidly explore and validate new formulations without spending months in the lab.

How do you bypass the normal process of pouring test articles and testing them months and years after cure? This is fundamentally a research activity that needs to conduct verifiable science. Not something you can guess at with an LLM.

Concrete mixes have become more complicated over time. Flyash has been around for a while, GU/L is relatively new and seems to set faster, often requiring retarders. Many different water-reducing additives are available. Air entraining agents tend to reduce strength. Fibers or steel pins added to the mix can improve crack resistance.

Batch plants will design mixes so some water can be added on site to improve workability. If you don't add water, the concrete will likely exceed spec.

A slump test is only one factor if many that impact concrete strength.

They sure are stretching to find a way to make this have something to do with being pro-America.

> Meta’s AI for concrete model can help suppliers more quickly incorporate U.S. materials into their mixes through an approach called adaptive experimentation.

> Proposes high-potential candidates: The AI suggests new mixes most likely to meet target specifications and can compare performance between U.S.-made and foreign materials

US imports 22% of its cement

> In 2024, Portland and blended cement were produced in 99 plants in 34 U.S. states, led by Texas, Missouri, California, and Florida. Nevertheless, there was significant import reliance. Net imports were 22% of total consumption, with the major source countries being Turkey (32%), Canada (22%), and Vietnam (10%). U.S. exports of cement last year were negligible.

https://www.constructconnect.com/construction-economic-news/....

I'm assuming this isn't for national security reasons, probably more to help the domestic industry deal with tariffs. I hope Meta used their extensive connections to the government.

Tangentially related, but there is a new generation of trucks that mix the concrete on-site. They can output small batches and change the mix on the fly. They solve a lot of headaches!

https://cementech.com/volumetric-technology/

I had to double check that this wasn't an April Fools joke. The GitHub project has commits from 2 weeks ago, so it's not.

Looking more closely though, this looks a lot like the Google "AI Cookie" from 2017, which also used Bayesian Optimization: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/ma...

Wet cement is kind of sloppy, so this makes some sense.

The website talks about making cement, but only describes making concrete. Making concrete involves mixing cement and fillers with water under controlled conditions. Making cement involves heating calcium carbonates and oxides with silicon dioxide or calcium silicate to form alite at a temperature of (so far as we understand) no less than 1250 C. Usually this is done with fossil fuels and any impurities in the raw materials (which are cost-constrained) go up the flue, making cement plants rather polluting. Carbon dioxide is a nearly inevitable byproduct (CaCO3 + SiO2 >> CaSiO3 + CO2) and is either captured at source (not implemented at most facilities) or released.

There is plenty of room for improvement in cement production. I'm not sure exactly how to apply AI to it but I guess I was hoping for more than this. If we are going to have the infrastructure renaissance that keeps being talked up by reformists of various stripes, we need more cement.

South America is also a surprising laggard in cement production, which is odd considering they have the materials and they need the roads. I think that environmental concerns and a continental aversion to coal might contribute.

I hate April Fools day so much. Is this a joke? I genuinely cannot tell.

I honestly thought this was going to be an April Fools gag.

First there was the rampocalypse. Then there was cementpocalypse. Let just hope the AI datacenters don't latch on to biofuel to supplement their energy requirements. It's just more profitable for farmers to sell calories to the AI overlords, the consumer food market is just a low margin grind.

The masons just showed up their involvement with AI and everything wrong in our times. The masks have fallen. /s

Jesus I hope they do proper testing for these experimental mixes and don't trust whatever random garbage AI decides you should mix in. This is exactly the kind of thing AI is absolutely terrible at because it has no logical skills or direct experience or ability to test it. If your AI coded stuff goes belly up, you get to try again. If your multi million dollar cement foundation turns out to be sub-par, thats multi million dollars to tear it out and then millions more to do it again right, and that is a best case scenario. The alternative is people dieing when their apartment building collapses.